Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP Photo
Amazon Labor Union member Tristan Lion Dutchin, 27, gestures as he awaits the unionization vote results, April 1, 2022, in New York.
As of today, the balance of power in America’s class struggle seems to have shifted just a bit.
Class struggle? What class struggle? More like an unending, one-sided blitzkrieg. Big businesses and small, corporations and private equity firms, shareholders and employers have all been clobbering workers for decades. The fierce and unified opposition of America’s bosses to allowing their workers even a smidgen of power has been the foundation of American economic life for the past 40 years.
But today, just maybe, that changed.
With the final count now in from JFK8, Amazon’s giant warehouse on Staten Island, workers have voted to go union by a count of 2,654-to-2,131. America’s wealthiest, most powerful, most seemingly indispensable company has lost to a pop-up coalition of workers who waged their campaign without affiliation with or assistance from a single established union. A generation, it’s clear, is stirring.
The rumblings have been audible for some time, but until recently, they’ve been contained to rarified sectors of the economy. That young workers have borne the brunt of America’s economic dysfunctions has been clear since the Crash of 2008. That they understood that American capitalism would have to be radically altered if they were to win some economic security was clear from their support for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, and enthusiasm for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. That the approval rating they gave to unions (77 percent) last year was higher than that which all Americans gave to unions last year (68 percent), which itself was the highest approval rating for unions in the past 50 years, was right there in Gallup’s polling.
But management could still comfort itself that the threadbare remains of the National Labor Relations Act, which no longer protected pro-union workers from being fired (it’s illegal, but an illegality for which no employer has suffered meaningful consequences for the past half-century), would enable them to suppress campaigns for unionization, no matter how much the workers wanted to unionize. That had been the way of the American economic world since the early 1980s, in which employer illegalities have been so common and unchecked that most unions despaired of organizing at all.
In the past couple of years, though, workers who believed their particular skills made them immune from the threat of firing have begun to unionize. (For the handful of truly undischargeable and established workers—professional athletes, movie actors, airline pilots—this was true even during the lean years.) Recent years have seen journalists and think tankers, adjunct professors and research assistants, animators and museum staffers organizing in droves. This was a revolt of professionals, and overlapping with it, of millennials with at least a facsimile of job security, and Gen Zers who can’t be replaced, too. Earlier this week, the undergraduates who work in Dartmouth College’s dining halls voted in an NLRB-supervised election to unionize, in a union of their own creation. The vote was 52-to-0.
In the past few months, however, the revolt has spread to millennials who aren’t professionals, whom management could easily replace. Crucially, it spread to Starbucks baristas—a disproportionately young and educated workforce, but one subject to every scheduling whim and threat of discharge that management could deploy. And yes, Starbucks had cultivated a “benign employer” image that it couldn’t risk tarnishing too publicly, though it has played standard employer hardball (subjecting its workers to tacit threats conveyed in compulsory anti-union meetings and the like) when it thought no one was looking.
But Starbucks workers have been winning in enough far-flung outlets that today, thousands of baristas in hundreds of stores have filed for unionization.
So many of the standard rules, both of unionizing and union-busting, have been broken with this victory, in ways that suggest that something more profound must be going on.
Starbucks isn’t Amazon, however. And Amazon has made clear in Bessemer, Alabama, and anyplace else where its labor practices have been called into question that its warehouse staff is just a necessarily evil until the company can robotize its entire workforce. By its actions, Amazon has signaled that it’s fine that the yearly turnover rate in its warehouses exceeds 100 percent, that in fact the jobs are all but designed to provoke a yearly turnover rate of more than 100 percent. The company wants its workers to exit; it’s a vastly preferable alternative to their staying and seeking a voice.
Besides, Amazon is the nation’s second-largest private-sector employer, after only Walmart, the club champion in union-busting. The idea of an Amazon warehouse workforce voting to unionize was, until today, all but unthinkable.
Now, it’s been thought, and done.
So many of the standard rules, both of unionizing and union-busting, have been broken with this victory, in ways that suggest that something more profound must be going on. Consider: The workers of the Amazon Labor Union who did the organizing (remember, no union provided them with professional organizers; the organizers were the workers themselves) only got the signatures of the bare minimum of workers legally required to demand an election—30 percent. Hardly any union calls for an election unless it has the signatures of 70 percent of the workforce, since they anticipate management’s threats and opposition will bring that figure way down by the time the actual election takes place.
Also now in question is the efficacy of management’s threat to fire workers who demand a say in the conditions of their work. Here, the economy itself seems to be bolstering workers’ courage. The rate of workers quitting their jobs remains at an all-time high. Many employers are plainly desperate to hire, and that has pushed pay scales up in normally bustling cities seeking to regain their bustle.
Such is the case in New York, where Amazon has been compelled to raise wages to keep the workers they have, but where other employers have raised them even higher. Such is not the case, I should add, in Bessemer, Alabama, where Amazon’s wage rate exceeds that of other local providers of comparable jobs. (Even in Bessemer, however, the rerun election is still too close to call and will be decided by challenged ballots. This is also unheard of; rerun elections typically don’t change much from the first one.)
Moreover, the Amazon workers could see the example of the Starbucks workers: people like themselves, subject to the stress and indignities of the regular, unsalaried wage regime, but surmounting management opposition to win a union in one, then two, then three shops, and campaigning for it, undaunted, in hundreds of others. If at Starbucks, why not at Amazon?
And now, if at Amazon, why not someplace else? Sometimes, a single victory can spark a wave of victories. That’s what happened in 1937, as the great UAW sit-down strike, occupying General Motors’ Flint, Michigan, factories, won them a contract with GM and inspired dozens of similar campaigns and hundreds of successful unionization campaigns across the land.
Of course, the Staten Island workers at JFK8 now must negotiate a contract with their stubbornly unwilling employer (though the new regime at the National Labor Relations Board appears determined to penalize employers who stall in hopes that the workers will give up). Nearly 20 years ago, the workers at a Walmart store in Quebec voted to unionize, and within six months the company shut the store down. But Amazon, by virtue of its promises on one-day delivery, simply cannot shutter large warehouses with thousands of workers in giant metropolises where a lot of its customers live. If anything, the company needs more infrastructure, not less. The ubiquity of Amazon locks them into employing a workforce that wants more from their jobs.
So maybe, just maybe, the economic and political gap between urban and rural America has a new dimension today. Maybe the millions of service and retail and supply chain and hotel and restaurant workers in cities will feel not just angry enough but also secure enough to do what their fellow workers at Starbucks and now Amazon are doing, and organize themselves into a union. (That sense of security could wane, of course, if the Fed raises interest rates high enough to quell the urban hiring boom.) Outside metro America, where good jobs remain scarce, it’s still hard to imagine that happening, but in cities, the Starbucks and Amazon workers have shown the way.
Still, I can’t help but think that this could portend the rising not just of a share of the workforce but also of a generation, whose politics are at least as left as any generation in American history. The workers and organizers of the last great private-sector union surge, the CIO organizers who during the 1930s built the only genuinely powerful labor movement we’ve ever seen in this country, were disproportionately young, too. The Reuther brothers (socialists) and Bob Travis (a communist) who helped build the UAW sit-down strike were in their twenties. Chris Smalls, the lead organizer at JFK8 in Staten Island, is in his early thirties; the baristas leading the Starbucks campaigns are similarly youthful.
The sooner that workers such as these expand their leadership roles, either within the established union movement or to new unions that can rise alongside the old, the better. Some existing unions—such as SEIU, which backs the baristas at Starbucks and has waged the fight for a $15 minimum wage during the past decade—may be more receptive to such a transformation. Others may be wary. (I’m thinking of the UAW, which, unable to organize the non-union auto plants in the South, turned to organizing college campuses, and now finds that nearly a quarter of its members are grad students.)
But Staten Island tells us that something has changed. Take the long-simmering grievances of a generation and the political sensibilities of some of its members, add the friendly (for now) job markets of American cities, and the power equation that has governed American workplaces and American lives for the past 40 years could be altered.
For the nation’s sake, let’s hope it is.
